I’m sitting here relaxing with a tasty holiday beverage after a hectic holiday week at the scoop shop. It’s Christmas Eve, and while all of my immediate and extended family lives far away, I can’t help but think of them and the great holiday memories we all share.
Some of the best ones are from Christmas Eves as a kid. It was always spent with my Dad’s side of the family, the side from Finland who somehow ended up in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. When my Dad’s parents, Sylvia and Joe, affectionately known to me as Gramma and Grampa, were still around, they would always host Christmas Eve.
They still lived in the house my Dad grew up in, on Elm Street in Fitchburg. Where the Elm Street pizza was invented. The house was small and cozy with furniture you could tell had a lot of stories to tell about the raising of four active children. The stairs to the bedrooms upstairs were steep and ominous for the younger ones. I’m not sure why, but the rooms that loom loudest in my mind are the small storage room on the back of the house and the detached single garage. They were full of interesting artifacts, among them polished rocks and equipment, empty jars, and what might be considered antique tools even back then.
The backyard was sloped and always full of mountains of snow that time of year, since as I would later learn, Fitchburg is smack in the middle of the snow belt of Massachusetts. When it rains along the coast or a Nor’easter barrels through New England, towns from Fitchburg to Worcester always seem to get thumped.
The day was always full of fun winter activities like snowman making, sledding, and even skiing at Hospital Hill, just up the road. In my memory, Hospital Hill is a giant and foreboding mountain like one you’d find in say, Switzerland or Tibet. I’m sure if I drove by there now, it would be much less intimidating than it was to a six year old on yard sale skis or a red plastic toboggan. In any event, Hospital Hill was a great place to learn to ski. They even had a rope tow for a while, terrifying as it was. While I never heard any stories of kids getting smooshed by passing trucks at the bottom of the hill, looking back in my mind and not recalling much of an effort for fencing between the bottom of the hill and the road, I have to believe it happened at least once. The upside of the dangerous downside of Hospital Hill was that there really was a hospital nestled on the top.
While we kids made snowmen in the yard or risked our lives at the Hill, Gramma was busy in the kitchen getting Christmas Eve dinner ready. The house was always warm and full of comforting food smells. The Christmas tree stood majestically in the living room, full of ornaments made with loving hands, My memories of those trees were that they were closer to Charlie Brown’s than one you’d see in a window at Macy’s, but there’s no denying the certain charm of a tree felled in Grampa’s favorite hunting forest. There were always a few gifts under the tree for us kids, and in the spirit of the season, resisting sleuthing for yours was futile.
The afternoons at the grandparents for us kids - my brothers Rick and Mike, cousins Beth and Rea, Charlotte, and once in a while Wendy, Cindy, and David, were always fun in a way that kids of today will never know. For these were the days before Ipads and Iphones, Fortnite and Tik Tok. Any of the fun and entertainment you found was that which you created yourself using prehistoric methods such as rummaging around the aforementioned storage room, digging out a Parchesi board, or throwing some Jax on the cracked cement walkway. You never had any idea what your friends at home were doing, and strangely enough, you didn’t care.
What you did care about that day was that soon after the sun went down, Santa would come strolling up the driveway of that little house on the street of Elm.
Dinner was always a feast thanks to Gram Sylvia, Mom Jen, Aunt Joyce, and Aunt Alma. Comfort food all around. Even inedible vegetables such as turnip and squash were made palatable when blanketed with gooey mini-marshmallows, and the beans got bedazzled with crunchy fried onions. Luntiloita was always on the menu. I don’t know how to spell it or remember what it actually was, but my best guess was it was some root vegetable that might come in your winter farm share. I do remember how much fun it was to say. ‘Please pass the luntiloita’. It was even more fun to say, because it was one of the only two Finnish words we all knew. The other being, of course, Hous Guy Yolowa. Merry Christmas. Sure, I could have googled ‘how do you say Merry Christmas in Finnish’, but that’s how it sounds, and for the sake of this memory, that’s all that matters to me.
While it’s fun to remember afternoons and Christmas Eve dinners, that day was really all about Santa. You see, it was not long after the Christmas cookie plate and Dad’s ice cream with cool whip on top desserts made their way around the dinner table that someone would say they thought they heard Santa’s bells outside or the clomping of reindeer hoofs on the roof. We kids, already on high alert for Santa’s impending visit, would perk up in our seats, and if we could get out from the table, we’d actually go to the nearest window to see if the jolly one was on the premises.
Sure enough, it was never long after the end of dinner, when the grownups were drinking coffee and dinner conversations were starting to lull, we’d hear a hearty ‘Ho, Ho, Ho’ coming from the driveway and getting louder as a round man in red approached the side door. ‘Merry Christmas! Ho! Ho! Ho!’ he’d exclaim, to the resulting glee of me, my brothers, and cousins. ‘Santa’s here! Santa’s here!’ we’d all chime as we extricate ourselves from the dinner table and skip toward the door. Santa would come barrelling in, a giant bag of toys slung over his shoulder and repeating his Ho, Ho mantra again and again. The energy in the kitchen was electric. Santa was here! The older kids, by Nancy Drew’ing which uncle had gone missing, could figure out it was Uncle Ed or perhaps the drunk neighbor Ted who got enlisted to be Santa a few hours earlier by the grown-ups who just weren’t feeling inspired to play the role that year.
But when you were young and still a believer, it didn’t matter that the Santa that just walked into that warm kitchen full of Luntilota ladened dinner dishes was wearing an outfit plucked from a day-after Christmas sale at Woolworth’s and a beard that barely covered this guy’s weekend stubble and beer breath. We were in the presence of royalty. Santa was in our house! He’d work the room for a minute, like only a once-a-year actor can do. He’d take a bite out of the Christmas cookie that was offered up. Like a rock star, he’d work his way through the adoring crowd and find his place on that old comfortable couch next to Chuck Brown’s tree.
We all gazed wide-eyed at Santa as we found our own plots on that little living room floor. Once we were situated and he’d used all his Santa one-liners about how much ground he had to cover that night and the demands of bringing toys to every kid in the world, he’d open up his big sack of goodies and pull out the first present. ‘Rea!’, he’d bellow. At which point, Rea, or whoever’s name he called, would jump up to join Santa. This usually involved the person sitting on Santa/Uncle Ed’s lap to open their present in front of the crowd of anxious kiddos and Kodak Instamatic wielding parents.
The gift we each got always seemed to be something from our Christmas lists for Santa. It was uncanny how he always knew what we wanted. As if we kids needed any more evidence that Santa was absolutely real.
That exercise repeated until everyone in the room had a gift. It truly was the stuff of dreams.
When Santa’s duffle was finally empty, that was his signal to be on his way. After all, he had millions of other houses to go to that night. Thinking back, It really was a thrill that he would spend so much time just at our Christmas gathering. He’d stand up, gather his empty bag, thank everyone for the hospitality, and with a few more Ho, Ho, Ho’s, he’d be on his way.
We kids were ok with that because part of Santa being ‘on his way’ meant he was stopping at our houses to fill our stockings and living room floors under our Christmas trees with all the presents we’d asked for in our letters and prayers. As he walked out that kitchen door towards his sleigh idling on the roof, we each happy sighed, yawned, and looked to our parents with that ‘we can go home now’ look.
Our parents would quickly pack up our things. They’d go out to our station wagons parked in the driveway, drop the back seats, and lay out our sleeping bags and pillows. Mom would be tucking us into those bags as Dad drove us off towards our home. We were tired but still jacked up on Christmas adrenaline, enough to power the Highland Lighthouse. I remember Mom trying to coax us to sleep as we gazed out the window of that Gran Torino wagon with the walnut veneer siding. Our eyes were fixed on the sky because we knew Santa who looked a lot like Uncle Ed was flying around up there somewhere, sleigh full of gifts for us. Before we actually gave in to sleep, Dad would have pointed to the sky at least six times as he said, ‘Look! I think I see Santa!’
When we rolled into our own driveway, we’d be groggy from sleeping through most of the drive home, but awake enough to spy under our tree to see if Santa had been here yet. Alas, in all those Christmas Eves in Fitchburg, he never beat us home. ‘Of course, he hasn’t been here yet. Fitchbury is much further north than here,’ our parents would say. Which made complete sense to our four to eight or so year old brains.
We’d be tucked into our beds for the night. Little did we know this is when Mom and Dad’s Santa work would just begin..
Great memories :)
Merry Christmas All!
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